“Did you know it was a rump roast? I tortured Thorsten until he told me. I had to dig human ass out of your mouth.”

“At least you didn’t fucking swallow it, Sloane. Why the fuck didn’t you stop me?”

“I tried, but you just went for it. Don’t you remember?”

Shit. I do remember.

I remember a lot more than that.

Sloane watches me a little too closely. She’s not as apathetic as she tries to appear. The longer I stare, the more her indifferent mask crumbles, and a faint blush rises beneath the freckles dusting her cheeks and nose.

This fucking girl. Panicking because I gave her a glimpse into how I feel. Clearly nervous about a conversation she’s desperate not to have. Ready to fly.

And I would do anything to keep her around, even if it means taking a hammer to my own heart.

“No.” I shake my head as my gaze drifts toward the centerpiece. “The last thing I remember is David coming through the door with the trolley. I don’t recall anything after that.”

When I glance up, Sloane’s lips twitch. It’s almost a smile. Her eyes are a little softer.

Fuck.

Just as I suspected. She’s fucking relieved.

I’ll absorb the venom of this burning sting. I drop my head into my hands. She’ll never know I remember every second of my embarrassing, unrequited confession. I’ll never forget the way her skin flushed such a pretty shade of pink when I said she was beautiful. I would have crawled across the table to kiss those plump lips when they pursed as I spilled my secrets between us.

I need to get it through my fucking thick skull. She will never want more than this. But I refuse to lose her. Sloane is the only person in the world who can look at my monster and find a friend. And I know she needs a friend just as much as I do. Maybe more.

“Are you okay?” she asks, her voice barely more than a whisper.

“Yeah. It’s just the drugs,” I lie again. I make a vow right this instant that it will be the last lie I ever tell Sloane Sutherland. “I feel like shit.”

Truth.

“I imagine you do. I know how it goes,” she says. She pulls the bowl away when she seems reasonably sure I’m done. “Well, not the eating people part. I don’t know about that.”

I give her a half-hearted glare which only serves to brighten her smile before she turns away and carries the bowl to set it in the hall, muttering to herself about dealing with it later. There’s a groan of pain from the end of the table and I’m a little grateful for something else to focus on besides the burn in my throat.

I look toward Thorsten. And for the first time, I really focus on the scene around me.

“Orb Weaver,” I whisper, my breath catching in my chest at the beautiful horror of an intricate web that shimmers in the candlelight. “Sloane…how?”

Her smile is bashful as she pushes away from the table with a shrug. “I had time to kill.”

Sloane walks toward Thorsten. His head hangs against his chest as blood drips down his face from the lightless caverns where his eyes once were. He stirs a little and groans before he fades back into unconsciousness.

“Nearly done,” she says, patting him on the shoulder as she stops to examine the pattern of fishing line behind him that extends from the floor to the ceiling.

Some lines intersect, others layer behind one another. Some are a thicker gauge than others, the thinner lines tied in delicate knots to hold the heavier thread in specific angles or approximations of curves. At different points and depths there are thin pieces of flesh hanging from the web.

Sloane withdraws a pair of latex gloves from a box on the table, then a tape measure and two pieces of pre-cut, thinner gauge fishing line. She hums to the music playing from her own playlist through a portable speaker as she ties the first of the two threads up on the web above Thorsten’s head, using the tape measure to distance out one metre from the first string to place the second. When the measurements are done, she returns to the table, meeting my rapt attention with a devious grin.

“You might want to look away, pretty boy,” she says, pinching the edge of the bread plate to slide the eyeballs closer to her end of the table.

“Fuck off. I’m not squeamish.”

“You sure?”

My stomach is not sure.

“Usually I’m not squeamish. I’ll be fine.”

Sloane shrugs and plucks one of the eyes from the plate with careful, delicate fingers. “One hundred percent positive?”

“I’d rather watch you make skin ornaments and eye baubles than go to the kitchen and check on Lobotomy David. Let’s just go with that.”

“Fair enough.”

Sloane heads back to the web, carefully winding the first of the two measured strings around the eye to trap it in the clear filament.

“You really did all this in a couple of hours?” I ask. The hem of her dress drifts higher up the backs of her thighs as she works at tying the line in knots. My dick hardens just imagining how the curve of her ass would feel in my hands, the softness of her flesh in my palms.

“I make each layer at the hotel first. It’s easier to glue them to drop sheets and then roll them up so I can peel them off when I get here,” she replies as she nods toward several scrunched-up pieces of paper-thin plastic on the floor next to the wall. “I knew I wanted to stage him in the dining room, so I found the measurements from the realtor’s records.”

Sloane approaches to retrieve the other eye, gifting me another shy smile before she heads back to the web with her prize. Just as she did with the first eye, she winds the thin strand of fishing line around the orb and ties it into her masterpiece before standing back to survey her work.

“Voilà!” she exclaims into Thorsten’s ear, but he doesn’t wake. She watches him for a moment, nudging his bloody arm where it’s tied to the chair. When he remains unconscious, she sighs and turns to face me. “He’s not very tough, this one. This is the fifth time he passed out on me.”

“To be fair, you did gouge out—”

“Pluck, Rowan. I plucked his eyes out.”

“You did pluck out his eyes. Though I dunno, Blackbird…that eye hole on the left looks a little gouge-y.”

She leans toward Thorsten with a scowl, scrutinizing the empty eye sockets as I bite down on a grin. “His left? Or my left?”

“His left.”

“Fuck off, it does not look gouge-y,” she says. Her doubt turns into a scowl as she looks back over her shoulder and catches the amusement in my eyes. “Dick.”

I laugh and try to avoid the tape measure as she chucks it at my head, though I’m still too drunk and drugged to avoid being hit in the arm. When I meet her eyes, she tries to look pissed, but she’s not. “You said before that it’s a map,” I say as I rub my forearm. She nods. “How?”

Sloane grins and comes closer, pulling off her gloves as she looks down at me with bright hazel eyes. That dimple pops out next to the corner of her lips as she holds out an upturned palm. “I’ll show you, if you think you can stay upright without puking on me.”

I slap her palm and she laughs but holds it out again, and this time I grab it. The room swirls as I stand. I’m not so convinced I’ll be able to keep my shit together, but Sloane just waits, patient and steady. Her grip is an anchor. When I stop swaying, she’s still there, ensuring that every step I take is a firm one as she leads me to her work of art.

“This is the scale,” she tells me as she points to the eyes set one metre apart above Thorsten’s unconscious head. “One metre equals ten kilometres on this map.”

Sloane pulls me closer. Heat radiates from her body to warm her ginger and vanilla scent. She leads me to the edge of the first layer of fishing line and then lets go of my hand to step behind me. Her fingers wrap around my upper arms as she rises on her tiptoes to look over my shoulder.